James Harris
Founder & Managing Principal
Fourteen years in in-house legal operations before founding the firm in 2013. Leads contract lifecycle and regulatory compliance engagements. Reachable directly at security@dflawconsulting.com.
About the firm
Thirteen years of unglamorous, careful work on the documents that decide whether a business is defensible.
Origin
Founded in 2013, after one bad audit too many
James Harris spent fourteen years inside legal and operations teams at regional employers across Morris and Essex counties before founding this practice. The pattern that pushed him out on his own was always the same: an organisation would pass its audits for years, then fail one badly — not because anyone was negligent, but because nobody owned the boring maintenance of its paperwork.
Deerfield & Falcone Law Consulting LLC was formed in Boonton in 2013 to own exactly that. The firm has never advertised for scale. It has grown almost entirely through referrals from CFOs, HR directors and outside counsel who needed a pair of hands they could trust with a document set.
Today the practice runs a deliberately capped number of concurrent engagements so that a principal can read every page of every file. That constraint is the product.
People
Who you will work with
A small bench, all senior. No engagement is handed to someone you have not met.
Privacy & data practice
Senior consultants
Data inventories, retention schedules and DSAR workflow design, with day-to-day experience of NJDPA and CCPA operational requirements in mid-market environments.
Counsel network
Independent attorneys
Where an issue requires licensed legal judgement we refer to independent New Jersey attorneys — or brief yours. We take no referral fees, in either direction, ever.
Principles
Four commitments we put in writing
We stay in our lane
We are consultants, not attorneys. If an engagement drifts into territory that needs a licensed lawyer, we stop, tell you, and help you get the right person. That boundary has cost us work and we still hold it.
Fixed fees, agreed first
You approve a scope and a number before we open a file. If the scope changes materially, we stop and re-quote rather than quietly running up hours.
You own everything
Every deliverable arrives in an editable format that you keep, including the internal checklists we used to produce it. No proprietary lock-in, no per-seat platform.
Confidentiality by default
Client names never appear in marketing without written permission. Documents are handled on encrypted storage and destroyed on request at the end of the retention window.
By the numbers
A record we can back up
0Engagements since 2013
0Active client relationships
0Median assessment turnaround
0Clients returning within 24 months
Figures are drawn from our internal engagement register as of July 2026 and are rounded. They describe our own workload, not guaranteed outcomes for any client.
Tell us what is keeping counsel awake
A 30-minute scoping call, no charge and no obligation. We will tell you honestly whether this is work we should take, work you can handle internally, or work that belongs with outside counsel.